by Olivia Gates
Roxanne had no doubt Sondoss’s exile-instead-of-imprisonment verdict had been wheedled out of the Aal Shalaans by Haidar, who could seduce the stripes off a tiger.
But when Amjad had become king, everyone had thought the first thing he’d do was deal Azmahar the killing blow of letting go of its proverbial hand. He hadn’t owed his ex-stepmother’s homeland any mercy. Strangely enough, he hadn’t ended the alliance.
Then, one month after she’d arrived, all hell had broken loose.
The arrogant fool of a now ex–crown prince had voted against Zohayd for an armed intervention in a neighboring country in the region’s latest defense summit, snapping the tenuous tolerance Amjad had maintained for Azmahar. And the kingdom that had been held together by the glue of its ally’s clout had come apart.
Just as Azmahar was gasping from the alienation, catastrophe struck. An explosion in one of its major oil drills caused a massive spill off its shores. Unable to deal with the upheavals, in response to the national and regional outcry, the overwhelmed and disgraced king had abdicated.
His brothers and sons, held as responsible, would no longer succeed him. Azmahar was in chaos, and Roxanne was one of those called upon to contain the situation, internally and internationally, as the most influential clans started fighting among themselves.
Out of the anarchy, consolidations had formed, splitting the kingdom into three fronts. Each backed one man for new king.
One of the candidates was Haidar.
Which meant he would come back. And she would stumble upon him.
She wanted that as much as she wanted a hole in the heart.
Then again, he’d already pulverized hers.
She cursed under her breath. This was ancient history, and she was probably blowing it out of proportion, anyway. She’d been a twenty-one-year-old only child who’d been sheltered into having the emotional resilience of a fourteen-year-old.
And man, had he been good. Phenomenal wouldn’t do him justice.
It had only been expected that she’d gotten addicted, physically, emotionally. Then she’d woken up. End of story.
She’d moved on, had eventually engaged in other relationships. One could have worked, too. That it hadn’t had had nothing to do with that mega-endowed, sizzling-blooded, frigid-hearted creature.
God. She was being cornered into defending her feelings and failures by a memory. Worse. By an illusion. Beyond pathetic.
She pushed away from the door, strode to her desk, snatched up her briefcase and purse, and headed out of the office.
It took her twenty minutes to drive across the city. One thing this place had was an amazing transportation system. Zohaydan—planned, funded and constructed.
It would take a miracle to pull Azmahar’s fat out of the fire without Zohayd. No wonder Azmaharians were desperate to get their former ally back in their corner. And a good percentage of them had decided on the only way to do that. Put the embodiment of the Zohayd/Azmahar merger on the throne.
But as people in general were addicted to dispute, and Azmaharians were no different, they couldn’t agree on which one. But disunity would serve them well now. Going after the two specimens in existence doubled their odds of having one end up on the throne.
She turned through the remote-controlled gates of the highest-end residential complex in the capital. This job came with so many perks it…unsettled her. Luxury of this level always did.
When she’d asked for more moderate accommodations, she’d been assured the project’s occupancy had suffered from so many investors leaving the kingdom. They hoped her presence would stimulate renewed interest in the facility.
Seemed they’d been right. Since she’d moved in, the influx of tenants had tripled. One neighbor had told her her reputation, and her mother’s, had preceded her, and her presence had many investors feeling secure enough to trickle back to Azmahar, considering it a sign things would soon be put back on track.
Yeah. Sure. No pressure whatsoever.
But the “privilege” she dreaded was being at ground zero with every big shot who would grace the kingdom as the race for the throne began. Word was, none of the candidates had announced a position or plans to show up. That only made stumbling across Haidar a matter of later instead of sooner.
She would give anything for never.
But then, she would give anything for a number of things. Her mother with her. A father. Any family at all.
In minutes, she was entering the interior-decorating triumph of an apartment that spanned one-quarter of the thirty-thousand-foot thirtieth floor. She sighed in appreciation as fragrant coolness and calibrating lights enveloped her.
She headed for the shower, came out grinding her teeth a bit less harshly.
She would have thrived on rebuilding the kingdom’s broken political and economic channels. But now the Aal Shalaan “hybrids,” as they were called here, would feature heavily in this country’s future—and consequently, partly in hers. Contemplating that wasn’t conducive to her focus or peace of mind. And she needed both to deal with the barrage of information she had to weave into viable solutions. Even if a new king took the throne tomorrow, and he and Zohayd threw money and resources at Azmahar, it wouldn’t be effective unless they had a game plan…
An unfamiliar chime sundered the soundproof silence.
She started. Frowned. Then exhaled heavily.
Cherie was almost making her sorry she’d invited her to stay.
They’d been best friends when they’d gone to university here, and they’d kept in touch. Roxanne’s return had coincided with Cherie’s latest stormy split-up with her Azmaharian husband. She’d left everything behind, including credit cards.
After the height of the drama had passed, Roxanne should have rented her a place to stay while she sorted out her affairs.
Though she loved Cherie’s gregarious company, her energy and unpredictability, Cherie took her “creative chaos” a bit too far. She went through her environment like a tornado, leaving anything from clothes to laptops to mugs on the floor, dishes rotting in the sink, and she regularly forgot basic order-and-safety measures.
Seemed she’d forgotten her key now, too.
Grumbling, Roxanne stomped to the foyer, snarling when the bell clanged again. She pounced on the door, yanked it open. And everything screeched to a halt.
Her breath. Her heart. Her mind. The whole world.
Across her threshold…
Haidar.
Air clogged in her lungs. Everything blipped, swam, as the man she remembered in distressing detail moved with deadly, tranquil grace, leaned his left arm on her door frame. His gaze slid from her face down her body, making her feel as if he’d scraped every nerve ending raw, before returning to her sizzling eyes, a slow smile spreading across his painstakingly sculpted lips.
“You know, Roxanne, I’ve been wondering for eight years.”
The lazy, lethal melody emanating from his lips swamped her. His smile morphed into what a bored predator must give his prey before he finished it off with one swat.
“How soon after you left me did you find yourself a new regularly available stud? Or three?”
Two
Something finally flickered in Roxanne’s mind.
Not an actual thought. Just… Wow.
Wow. Over and over.
She didn’t know how long it took the loop of wows to fade, to allow their translation to filter through her gray matter.
So this was what eight years had made of Haidar Aal Shalaan.
Most men looked better in their thirties than they did in their twenties. Damn them. A good percentage improved still in their forties, and even fifties. The loss of the smoothness of youth seemed to define their maleness, infuse them with character.
In Haidar’s case, s
he’d thought there had been no room for improvement. At twenty-six he’d seemed to have already realized his potential for perfection.
But…wow. Had photographic evidence and her projections ever been misleading! He’d matured from the epitome of gorgeousness into force-of-nature-level manifestation of masculinity. Her imagination short-circuited trying to project what he’d look like, feel like, in another decade. Or three.
His body had bulked up with a distillation of symmetry and strength. His face had been carved with lines of untrammeled power and ruthlessness. He’d become a god of virility and sensuality, hewn from the essence of both. As harsh as the desert’s terrain, as menacing as its nights. And as brutally, searingly, freezingly magnificent.
Whatever softness had once gentled his beauty, warmed the frost she’d always suspected formed his core, had been obliterated.
“Well, Roxanne?” He cocked that perfectly formed head, sending the blue-black silk that rained to his as-dark collar sifting to one side. She would have shivered had her body been capable of even involuntary reactions. She could actually hear the sighing caress of thick, polished layers against as-soft material. Mockery tugged at his lips, enhanced the slant in his eyes. He could see, feel her reaction. Of course. He was triggering it at will. “I’ve had bets about which of us found a replacement faster.”
“Why bet on a sure thing? I had to settle in back home, reenroll in university before I started recruiting. That took time. All you had to do was order a stand-in—or rather a lie-in—from your waiting list that same day.”
His eyebrows shot up.
If he was surprised, it wasn’t any more than she was.
Where had all that come from?
Seemed she had more resentment bottled up than she’d known. And his appearance had shaken out all the steam. Good to depressurize and get it over with.
“Touché.” He inclined his head, his eyes filling with lethal humor. “I was in error. The subject of the bets shouldn’t have been how long until you found replacements, but how many you found. I was just being faithful in quoting your parting words when I said a stud or three. But from…intimate knowledge of the magnitude of your…needs, I would bet you’ve gone through at least thirty.”
Her first instinct was to take off his head with one slashing rejoinder. She swallowed the impulse, felt it scald her insides.
No matter how she hated his guts and his nerve in showing up on her doorstep, damn his incomparable eyes, he was important. Vital even. To Azmahar. To the whole damn mess. His influence was far-reaching, in the region and the world. And he had the right mix of genes in the bargain.
And then, she wasn’t just a woman who was indignant to find an ex-lover at her door unannounced, but also one of the main agents in smoothing out this crisis. Whether he became king or not, he could be—should be—a major component in the solution she would formulate. She should rein in further retorts, drag out the professional she prided herself had tamed her innate wildness and steer this confrontation away from petty one-upmanship.
Then she opened her mouth. “By the rate you were going through women when I was around, you must be in the vicinity of three hundred.” Before she could give herself a mental kick, the bedevilment in his smile rose, prodded her on instead. “What? I missed a zero? Is it closer to three thousand?”
He threw his head back and laughed.
Her heart constricted on what felt like a burning coal. The sound, the sight, was so merry, so magnificent, so—so…missed, even if she didn’t remember him laughing like this…
“You mean ‘regularly available’…um, what is the feminine counterpart for stud? Nymph? Siren?” He leveled his gaze back at her, dark, rich, intoxicating laughter still revving deep in his expansive chest. “But that number would pose a logistical dilemma. Even the biggest harem would overflow with that many nubile bodies. Or did you mean three thousand in sequence?”
She glared at him. “I’m sure you can handle either a concurrent or a sequential scenario.”
He let out another laugh. “I knew I should have approached you for endorsements. But I also have to burst your bubble. Whatever tales you heard of my…exploits were wildly exaggerated. I had to prioritize, after all, and other lusts took precedence. Success, power, money. The drive to acquire and sustain those doesn’t mix well with deflating one’s libido in a steady supply of feminine arms. And then, time is not only all of the above, it is finite. You know how time-consuming women can be.”
Her lips twisted, with derision, with the twinge that still gripped her heart. “I don’t. I’m still playing for the same team.”
His eyes turned pseudo-amazed. “You never even…went on loan? I would have thought someone with your…needs wouldn’t mind widening her horizons where the pursuit of pleasure was concerned.”
“Why? Have you? Widened your horizons?”
He let out another bark of distressingly virile amusement. “How can I, when I’m a caveman who’s unable to develop beyond my programming? The only thing I managed was to take your advice—purged myself of any trace of ‘creepy territorial crap.’”
She reciprocated his razzing, sweeping his six-foot-five frame with disdain. By the time she came back to his eyes, she was kicking herself. It didn’t do a woman’s heart or hormones any good, getting a load of how his sculpted perfection filled, pushed, strained against his black-on-black clothes. Inviting touch, inciting madness…
She gritted her teeth against the moist heat spreading in her core. “And that must be the legendary eidetic memory some of you Aal Shalaans are said to possess. As if you need more blessings.”
He slid an imperturbable glance down the foot between them. “If you feel we’ve received more than our fair share, you can take up your grievance with the fates.” A sarcastic huff accompanied a head shake. “But if you think perfect recall is a blessing, you have evidently never been plagued by anything like it. True blessing lies in the ability to forget.”
Her heart squeezed with something that confused her. Regret? Sympathy? Empathy?
No. That would indicate she was responding to something he felt. And everyone knew that the ability to feel was not among his abilities or vulnerabilities.
She narrowed her eyes, more exasperated with the chink in her resolve than with him. “Come to think of it, it must be terrible to have an infallible memory. There must be so much you would have preferred to forget, or at least blur enough to rationalize and romanticize.”
All traces of devilry vanished as he thrust his hands into his pockets. Her gaze dragged from his stunning face down to the silky material stretching across the potency she remembered in omnisensory detail…
“I can certainly do with some blurring to take the edge off at times.” The predatory challenge flared again. “But one thing about possessing clarity that time doesn’t dull—I make one hell of an unforgiving enemy, if I do say so myself.”
She snorted. “Yeah. And I hear so many love you for it.”
“Does it look like I’d want or even abide ‘love’?”
His mock affront would have been irresistible if it wasn’t also overwhelmingly goading. She felt just a second away from venting her unearthed frustration in a gnawing, clawing physical attack on this unfeeling monolith!
She exhaled. “That simpering, useless sentiment, huh? No. From what I hear, you want only obedience, blind, mute and dumb.”
His smile was self-satisfaction itself. “And I get it, too. Very useful, and blessedly soothing, for someone in my position.”
“Your mother’s son to the last gene strand, aren’t you?”
“I like to think I’m the updated and improved version.”
His smirk made her want to drag him to her by the hair to taste those heartlessly sensual lips—and to bite them off.
Had he always been this…inflammatory?
But now the addiction had been cured. Now that she knew what he was without a trace of the “rationalizing or romanticizing” she’d been guilty of heavily employing, she was reacting to him as she should have all along.
Yeah? With thinly suppressed hostility overlying a barely curbed resurgence of lust?
“Invite me in, Roxanne.”
Her heart choked out another salvo of arrhythmia.
The electrifying invocation he made of his demand, her name.
She swallowed, trying to extricate herself from his influence, damning him and herself for how effortless it was for him, what a struggle it was for her. “You…you want to come in?”
“No, I came to conduct a verbal duel on your doorstep.”
He moved forward and she surged to abort the step that would have taken him over her threshold. “I couldn’t care less what you came to do. But said duel is done. Not so nice of you to drop by, Prince Aal Shalaan. Hope I don’t see you again.”
He resumed his former position, feet braced farther apart, hands in pockets again. “Tsk. All those reports lauding your ability to deal with the most thorny situations and the most exasperating individuals must have been exaggerated.”
“No one factored you in when they were gauging thorny exasperation. Even my super diplomacy powers have a limit.”
“Or maybe I’m your kryptonite.” His smile was now the essence of patience. A hunter with unlimited time to set up his quarry’s downfall. “As much as I enjoyed our opening skirmish out here, I would continue our battle in a more private setting. For your sake, really. You’re the one who lives here. Surely you don’t want your neighbors to witness our…escalations?”
